a grave word so the dead may listen, lie still and unawake
by flesh and bone telephone
Summary: "He's gone," He whispers, "I made him go away." — a word given in good faith, blood laid to siege and a history embittered. Niklaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, Henrik and Finn. An Originals piece. ONESHOT.


**disclaimer:** i don't own anything.  
**dedication:** to my non-existent readers, ilu but you're m.i.a and that makes me feel sad. just thought i should reel you back in with a non-romantic tvd piece. that's right guys, i'm not rooting for any pairing in this. this is all just original angst.  
**warning:** again, no ships here, just family angst. also, people might seem a little OC, methinks. also, unbetad. any complaints? go fuck yourself.  
okay don't fuck yourself, just, ugh. i am so tired of life right now. don't mean to take it out on you, readers. you're a precious bunch of people and i should be the one to fuck myself. really.  
**notes:** i miss ffnet, i miss the fandom. i'm just not feeling the love as much these days. where is the love, guys? for tvd and reason and my crappy writing? i miss you all so terribly.  
**even moar notes:** probably the only fic where i haven't copy-pasted in indie rock lyrics...

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Children who hadn't known at all what they were doing, Rebekah had said in whispers faint with horror, faint with fright, she had admitted to having forgiven him.

Niklaus had known, he knew the danger, the looming hand of death and in all his misery...in all his misery he'd wanted the wolves to snatch the life from him the same way they had it put it in his mother's womb. _Bastard_, Mikael had said, the heart of the world burning in his eyes when Elijah held him back. He thrashed, he roared, a lion with a spear in his side - _Murderer_, words that echoed in the chasm within Niklaus's soul, somewhere between the heart and the throat. A while later Mikael had collapsed like a far older man, not like the giant in all of Niklaus's night terrors. It was wronger this way, all of it was wrong. The tears ran crooked down Mikael's face, features twisted in the ragged claws of grief..._ no son of mine, never a son of mine - you killed my boy. You stupid boy._

The blows did not come. Mikael retreated far into himself, it seemed he intended never to return again. The village fell silent. Something closed up in the heart of their homestead, a wound sewn shut with a careless hand, mended with silence and the loaded quiet of everyone's thoughts.

Mikael wasn't his father, but Niklaus had not done his duty as a brother should have. Henrik who always wailed the loudest when hurt, who ran so fast into the field it seemed he was floating on the wind. Henrik was too young to understand the harsh set of Niklaus's shoulders, the sudden fearful quiet that plagued him whenever father entered the room, as if Mikael's very presence snuffed the spirit out of him.

Henrik so young and so very dead.

* * *

"Do you ever regret it?" Klaus asked, his brittle rage had abated - fallen away to reveal a man with the eyes of a child, an _orphan._

Rebekah smiled a smile, her face like one of those pleasant porcelain masks with a mouth poised for the viewers benefit, to be derived and seen according to how the viewer pleased. To be what was required of her. Finn's skin was like stone, cold to the touch, and even her smile shivered when the chill hit her bones. He was set out on the table like any corpse would, chest rigid, the dagger's hilt climbed out of his heart like a plant that had sprung from within.

Niklaus was her world, he was her sun, her life. Little by little he killed the spark of her surrounding stars out, those entities that were a part of her universe - Finn first, Elijah dismissed and soon Kol whose insolence begged for a fate equal to her eldest brother's.

His question hung in the air, a hook swimming for her to hang herself on.

"Never," she said, but she had paused for too long a time in answering, had seemed too thoughtful. Niklaus had counted the seconds, they had been growing further as the years went, the space between his questions and the surety of Rebekah's agreement. She was not so prompt as she once was in declaring her loyalty.

"Never?" He whispered, watching her touch the hilt of the knife. She only tested the grip, did not move it and soon turned away from Finn the way she would dismiss a human body, a meal.

A part of her screamed and roared, and she was afraid of it. Rebekah was afraid of the hot anger that rushed through her insides, just beneath the skin.

_Not loud enough for you to hear_, she came to him where the fire threw the anguished pleading lines of his face into harsh relief. She pulled him away from the burning embers, did not care for the blood slick on his hands. _Not yet._

_Never?_ Klaus's eyes begged. She tucked him into the bed. The sheets still smelt of the Venetian who had owned the house, hidden beneath the floorboards, the stench of lavender and decay. She looked like mother.

_Not yet._

* * *

Together, Elijah said, stepping forward as he had never done before. Always so noble and so regal, the change had made his spine stern and harder than steel. They feared Mikael. They feared themselves. Niklaus met his eyes like a question, and something almost like guilt made Elijah bow his head. "I should have protected you," his eyes said, neck bared as if he was offering his head to Niklaus for all the times he had not had the courage to defend him, "Forgive me," it begged, "Forgive me." When he smiled it was the quirk of a mouth that seemed just about to curl into a quavering frown, they were still young then, and Elijah had needed Klaus to forget. He could protect him now. They could protect each other.

It was Rebekah's hand that caught his own, curling around his fingers and watching the hard bob of his throat when he swallowed. "Niklaus," she said in a voice that sounded so much like mother's, but so much sweeter, untempered by the scars of her own mistakes. "Brother." With love so dear and pure, how could he refuse her? How could he fail them now, when he had failed Henrik so abominably?

There was nothing to forgive, Elijah had till the end of the world to prove himself a chivalrous sot.

Rebekah had forever to turn her bitter, forever with him to turn her raging and lonely and wanting for more than he would allow her.

"Don't leave me," he only asked, summer balmed the evening and the ashes of the white oak tree spiked the air like shards of glass. Rebekah had the grace not to wince when he caught onto her fingers with a violent desperate need to have them promise it, "Swear it. _Swear it." -_

* * *

He puts her in her box, he locks her away. His icy figurine, a coffin collecting dust. Somewhere along the years Rebekah looses count of the times he's trapped her in a box, she thinks that she should be used to the slide of cold steel between the red hisses of her heart, the way it suddenly stops, turns to stone, to ash. How sleep falls like an avalanche, crushing her whole body in an ice she cannot escape until he wills.

She should have acquired some sort of immunity to the agony of it all, she should be used to it.

It's catharsis every time, trapped in resin. His little amber wasp. His perfect little doll.

Klaus's tears fall against her skin, drop like acid against the ashy death of them. As if _she_ is the one who has hurt him, as if _she_ is the one with her hands around a knife, blade poised against his heart.

"He's gone," he whispers, "I made him go away."

Her insides ripple as if someone had thrown a lit match at them and she is a shell. A hot, tiny burn, biting quickly and bursting into a whirlwind of fire. Her body doesn't move. She's a body in a box. The flame burns and burns and the lid comes down regardless. Her eyes dance behind her lids, and the air turns to dust in her throat. The fire burns until it can hold no more in the darkness of the coffin, it exhausts and expires, leaving behind a ghost of a sting.

_I was too loud,_ the silence swallowed her up.

The years dragged her into a dream. Klaus flinching under the stern look of an adult, Klaus promising to take her where she wanted to go, to let her take the lessons taught to Parisian dancers, Klaus saying _I made him go away I made him go away-_

The knife twists.

She can't wake up.

* * *

_-"I swear it,"_ Rebekah chimed, had not hesitated. Bless her perfect soul, so open, so pleading and unflinching.

"Mikael," Niklaus offered the name, the retreat. He gave them a choice, he won't have it said that he didn't. He won't. "He'll follow, he'll murder us all."

Elijah stepped forward, studying their joined hands like they eluded him, like he wished to convey some similar show of faith and loyalty but did not know how. He had never had much practice in giving love, nor receiving love. Their parents had treated them reasonably enough, but with Mikael there was always too much rage to accept his affections, and with mother too much hypocrisy.

Niklaus had never been given love, not even with Tatia, and how they had fought over that doe-eyed girl. How they had fought, all for nought. He was ready to take love, to steal affection and treasure it like a starved thing. Horde it within himself as a creature would. He didn't know anything else.

"I won't," Elijah, at length, said in a grave hush. He looked so struck when Rebekah smiled at him, bright and watery, raising out her palm to him. His eyes fell, a flicker of defeat, the admission, a surrender that was devastating enough to rob him of his stoicism. He took her hand tentatively, like he was afraid of breaking it, Rebekah had always loved Niklaus best. Elijah had never made an oath before. He had to be careful, the words shook in his throat, reverent, "Always and Forever." -

* * *

A girl slips through his fingers, Elijah had not held tight enough. It's in his eyes, in the way his words hitch in his throat, the way he turns away from his brother.

"Get her," Klaus says, "Find her."

Elijah bows his head, body stiff and moving with the mechanical rigidness of practice perfected. It gives him away. His fists tremble in his pockets and then he whips away like the reckoning.

_Fetch,_ Niklaus had said and threw him into the world.

Elijah obeyed. They shared one look before he left. His eyes were cool with a rage restrained, and it struck each brother how very much like Mikael the other looked.

* * *

-"And Mikael?" Klaus whispered.

"Eternity," Elijah smiled warm, and sure and entirely too lighthearted. "We have eternity to run from him."

Eternity. Rebekah's grin and Elijah's leash in his hand, _forever._

_Eternity to learn to hate and curse me. You will grow weary of me, yet._

But hope, the terribly human pathos, it rose in him in a surge that choked his throat and had him hiding his face in his sister's hair, gasping for air, white ash splintering his insides and the glassiness of Henrik's eyes carved into the marrow of his bones. _I was dead before now, it is only fitting that -_

It is only fitting that-

But there was no justice in the world, nothing fit. All casualties of fate, all pieces in a broken puzzle and set to mend against the wrong partners.

"Remember well," Niklaus murmured, "Remember well."

* * *

"Look at you," Kol's mouth turned vicious, his eyes were affectionate, malicious. "Living it up, hauling us around. Luggage, are we?"

Klaus has the dagger up his sleeve, Kol _knows_. It's in the way his smile turns marginally sharper, the way his gaze starts to broil like a poison brewing. Finn's box lies under the floor, Kol walks over the paneling like he's pretending he doesn't know it's there. Like he doesn't know why he's here.

"We were not immortalized to spend eternity in boxes," Kol says, "Niklaus, we aren't your toys. You can't shut us away whenever we displease you."

Niklaus moves in closer, Kol doesn't even flinch. Fearless as always, too insolent to ever have the mind to obey and follow as he should.

"I imagine dessication looks better on Finn than it does on me, considering that he's a boring sanctimonious ninny I'd even believe the state would be an improvement." Kol's words dance, sparklers of frivolity with tails of red flame. Bonfire nights and snapping pine cones. He almost sounds like his little brother again. Younger than Rebekah even. Older than Henrik, Henrik who was so very young and so very dead. "Come on, then."

Niklaus almost hesitates.

"Well?" Kol snaps, his posture loosens, like he's going to give him the brawl of his life. "Come at me. Perhaps I'll see Henrik in my dreams, wouldn't you like that, Nik? To see Henrik again?"

He growls, a noise ripped from his throat and from the back of his mind, like the pull of some string in him that Kol has rooted out. It is an _invasion._

It's the jackhammer truth._  
_

Kol's smile turns pitying, it's the oddest look. "You don't know how to love us, Niklaus. Not properly. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you hadn't killed him -" but he hadn't, he hadn't, _he hadn't killed him,_ it had been an _accident_, it had - "Where would we be now? Not destined for coffins I imagine."

"Don't -" it's a harsh warning, but it has too much of the ache of a plea about it. "Kol -"

"You cannot own us, Niklaus. You are very difficult to love, but we try. We do try, don't we, though? You can't fault us for that, can you?"

The dagger finds home, Kol's eyes are full of a horrible sort of laughter when Niklaus lowers him to the floor.

His mouth is fixed in a smile, like that of an adult who has humors a child by 'losing' a game to him. It's the smile Klaus used to give Henrik when he'd let him win their races.

It cuts every way.

* * *

_Henrik, Henrik_. His fingers felt slick and sticky red, Niklaus curled them into his head, knuckled white and trembling as if he could rip out the thoughts from his very scalp. _Henrik._

Henrik who followed him everywhere, even into the wood and into death were Niklaus had abandoned him.

He teaches Rebekah how to hate him, shows Elijah where he is most vulnerable - it is not very difficult to find, it has always been loneliness,_ loneliness_ - where to throw his strikes for most damage, how to disarm and misdirect, how to put on the finest of masks. Rebekah is a performance he is responsible for, a glamorous lie that was set to compromise herself for his sake.

_For his sake_.

Niklaus cannot trust them, they think. He wants too much, too desperately, too selfishly.

He finds the doppelganger, he finds Elijah. He tells him, _see what I am. Behold what I am_. Furious and wanting and more dead than alive. Haunting you like a ghost, reeling like a hope when all cause for it is _lost._

Niklaus puts the knife in his hand, and shows him his throat.

Blood is blood is blood.

_Remember well,_ he'd warned, red still slick on his hands. So many hearts beating against his tearing palms when he'd ripped their lives out, when they _swore_ to him, _remember well._

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**end notes: **i love the originals, but i can never do them justice, really. so i'ma just have to suck it. if you review i will hate myself less, i guess.


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